The Second Coming

books were Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox, Jr., both books rain-soaked, sun-dried, and swollen to fat loaves. She opened Captain Blood, sat on the steps, and read:
    Picking his way daintily through that shambles in the waist came a tall man with a deeply tanned face that was shaded by a Spanish headpiece. He was armed in back-and-breast of black steel beautifully damascened with golden arabesques. Over this, like a stole, he wore a sling of scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. Up the broad companion to the quarterdeck, moving with easy assurance, until he stood before the Spanish Admiral.
    The words were still clear on the thick yellow page but the paper crumbled like bread and a bakery smell rose in her nostrils. Words surely have meanings, she thought, and there is my trouble. Something happens to words coming to me from other people. Something happens to my words. They do not seem worth uttering.
    People don’t mean what they say. Words often mean their opposites.
    If a person says to you: I hate to tell you this, but— she doesn’t hate to tell you. She likes to tell you. This is a good place to make a new start with words. A man wrote these words over fifty years ago and here they’ve been ever since, lying in a dark cellar. She read the phrase aloud: a tall man with a deeply tanned face. It sounded strange in the dead silence and the warm Carolina sunlight.
    A large brindled dog came down from the trail, straight across the ruins, sat down and looked at her, not panting and not wagging his tail. He did not have a collar. His head was as wide and flat as an anvil. No doubt he belonged to a hiker but he did not leave. His clear hazel eyes looked from her to the book and back to her. An orange tuft above his eye moved like a man cocking an eyebrow. When she met his gaze, he cocked the other eyebrow and looked at a chipmunk. Can a dog be embarrassed?
    She opened The Trail of the Lonesome Pine—it smelled more of school library than bakery—and read:
    Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains—how, when two men meet at the same girl’s house, “they makes the gal say which one she likes best and t’other gits”—Hale little dreamed that the first time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass behind the big chimney and executed a war dance on it, cursing the blankety-blank “furriner” within from Dan to Beersheba.
    Yes, that’s it, she thought, forgetting about the dog. Ordinarily people have ways of doing things—like the people who lived in this house long ago and read this book. It was up to the “furriner” to catch on. As for her: either she had not caught on to the way people do things, or people did not know what they were doing and there was no use trying to catch on. In either case, this seemed as good a place as any to make a start.
    Make a start at what? For one thing, she could read these books for more clues, go to town, visit the public library, obtain a library card, take out more books, speak to the librarian, sit on the bench, observe people, speak to them, and either catch on to their ways or, if they didn’t have any ways, make up one’s own.
    She examined the window. It must have been a glass transom for a double door, for it had a big brass latch and it was almost too heavy to wrestle up the steps and through the vines. Panting, she propped it against a chimney and knelt for a look. It was not broken. Cellar rootlets stuck to the glass. No, not rootlets, they were lead cames. When she leaned over to see if the lead went through, the sun made dull colors through the dust. The panes were stained glass.
    Dragging the transom to the foot of the path, she leaned it under the dripping rock and went to get soap, rag, and moss. The dog followed, his serious hazel eyes attentive but unable to meet her gaze.
    It gave pleasure to make a soft soaped Brillo pad of moss and scrub every inch of glass, frame, lead, and brass, doing one camed section at a time and rinsing it under the trickle. The water was not cold and had a mineral reek.
    Downhill and easy going to the greenhouse, but her arms trembled as she pushed the transom up the wall until it rested on the concrete ledge. Now the trick was to stand on the ledge and slide the transom up the first slope of glass without falling off. It couldn’t be done. There